Documentary Film Festivals Vol. 1: Methods, History, Politics

306 Pages·2020·4.878 MB·English

by  Aida Vallejo, Ezra Winton

FRAMING FILM FESTIVALS
Documentary
Film Festivals Vol. 1
Methods, History, Politics
Edited by
Aida Vallejo · Ezra Winton
Framing Film Festivals
Series Editors
Marijke de Valck
Department of Media and Culture Studies
Utrecht University
Utrecht, The Netherlands
Tamara L. Falicov
University of Kansas
Kansas City, MO, USA
Every day, somewhere in the world a film festival takes place. Most people
know about the festival in Cannes, the worlds’ leading film festival, and
many will also be familiar with other high profile events, like Venice, the
oldest festival; Sundance, America’s vibrant independent scene; and
Toronto, a premier market place. In the past decade the study of film fes-
tivals has blossomed. A growing number of scholars recognize the signifi-
cance of film festivals for understanding cinema’s production, distribution,
reception and aesthetics, and their work has amounted to a prolific new
field in the study of film culture. The Framing Film Festivals series pres-
ents the best of contemporary film festival research. Books in the series are
academically rigorous, socially relevant, contain critical discourse on festi-
vals, and are intellectually original. Framing Film Festivals offers a dedi-
cated space for academic knowledge dissemination.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14990
Aida Vallejo • Ezra Winton
Editors
Documentary Film
Festivals Vol. 1
Methods, History, Politics
Editors
Aida Vallejo Ezra Winton
University of the Basque Country ReImagining Value Action Lab
(UPV/EHU) Lakehead University
Leioa, Spain Thunder Bay, ON, Canada
Framing Film Festivals
ISBN 978-3-030-17319-7 ISBN 978-3-030-17320-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17320-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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P : V . 1—B a V
reface ol y ida allejo
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and zra inton
This book (indeed books, as there are two volumes that make up this col-
lection) has been elaborated through a long process of hard work and
mutual collaboration. As such, it has evolved significantly through the
progression of bringing new collaborators on board, expanding to a more
accurate, elaborate and thorough engagement with our much-loved topic
of research: documentary film festivals. To those who have met us at con-
ferences and festivals where we made flushed proclamations concerning
the prospective publication, we can at long last say it is in the world, and
do so with a satisfied smile on each of our faces and a feeling of release in
our souls.
The project’s wide scope has made it worthy of two volumes,
Documentary Film Festivals Vol. 1. Methods, History, Politics and
Documentary Film Festivals Vol. 2. Changes, Challenges, Professional
Perspectives, which form a tandem set that tackles key issues at stake in
both Documentary Studies and Film Festival Studies. Both books can be
read separately or together as a single collection, but they don’t require
readers to follow a given order. Nevertheless, the first volume includes
some contributions that help to frame the study of documentary film fes-
tivals in a wider context, namely a review of the literature that brings
together Film Festival Studies and Documentary Studies, an interview
with Bill Nichols about this subject of inquiry and a historical chapter
about documentary at film festivals. While we might say the first volume is
more oriented to the past, the second looks towards the future of docu-
mentary film festivals. Across both volumes, historical and political con-
cerns are complemented by the study of recent changes that have occurred
v
vi PREFACE: VOL. 1—BY AIDA VALLEJO AND EZRA WINTON
in the festival circuit that affect documentary production, distribution,
curation, exhibition and reception.
Now that we are completing our own stage of prolonged production,
we think it’s an appropriate moment to look back and share how we came
to research the fascinating topic that has culminated in two books, and to
introduce the reader to the personal experiences that brought us here. We
hope you enjoy the book before you and find its content as challenging as
we did, while also drawing inspiration from fresh insights into the enchant-
ing and dynamic social, political, economic and cultural worlds of docu-
mentary film festivals.
a researcher naVigating a groWing festiVal circuit
(aida Vallejo)
In 2004, while still a university student participating in the European
Erasmus Exchange programme, I visited the Thessaloniki Documentary
Festival in Greece. Back then I was stunned by the capacity of feature-
length documentaries to attract a big audience at a moment when the
classical formats associated with Nichols’s expository mode (1991, 34–38)
were challenged by new aesthetic forms. The appearance of Bowling for
Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002) in movie theatres two years earlier
represented a turning point in documentary exhibition and a boost for
documentarians to unleash their creativity and go beyond the classic dis-
tribution circuit, hitherto primarily controlled by television.
A few years later, in 2007, while studying the narrative construction of
contemporary documentary at Autonomous University of Madrid, I
focused my attention on film festivals as an object of academic study. The
shift from textual analysis to contextual concerns in my research seemed a
natural step towards understanding the channels of circulation that had
given exposure to the feature-length documentary form in previous years.
While working as a critic covering some documentary film festivals of dif-
ferent character, such as the veteran Zinebi Documentary and Short Film
Festival of Bilbao, the internationally recognized Thessaloniki Documentary
Festival and the daring newcomer Punto de Vista de Navarra, I started to
reflect upon their role in the circulation of films.
Creative documentary had suddenly taken the stage, breathing new life
into a genre that was for a long time relegated to television and which had
adopted the reportage formats associated with that medium. The spread
PREFACE: VOL. 1—BY AIDA VALLEJO AND EZRA WINTON vii
of creative documentary and the extension to feature-length productions
provided the necessary input for film festivals to multiply across the globe
and maintain a continuous flow of diverse and high-profile films that
would fill their programmes, while new digital technologies bolstered pro-
duction and exhibition, facilitating new recording, editing and projection
infrastructures. A preliminary search for documentary showcases inevita-
bly raised questions of context: How many festivals were currently operat-
ing worldwide? What was their international relevance? Who were the
people behind these events that created an audience for new documentary
trends spreading worldwide, such as first-person documentary or—as
would be seen later on—animation and interactive documentary? Eager to
answer these questions, I embarked on a research project that allowed me
to travel throughout the European continent, from Zinebi in my home-
town Bilbao (Basque Country, Spain) to Jihlava (Czech Republic); from
Dokufest in Prizren (Kosovo) to Helsinki (Finland); from ZagrebDox
(Croatia) to IDFA (Amsterdam, the Netherlands).
The proliferation of festivals specializing in documentary film cannot be
dissociated from the appearance of certain films that laid the foundations
for further documentary exhibition. Moreover, several festival founders
were also filmmakers themselves. I remember the words of the director of
the Documentarist Film Festival, Necati Sönmez, in the cafe of cinema
Olympion in Aristotle Square during the Thessaloniki Documentary Film
Festival (Greece) in 2010, as he spoke about his reasons and inspiration to
create his own film festival in Istanbul (Turkey). Les glaneurs et la glaneuse
(The Gleaners and I, Agnès Varda, 2000) was indeed the film that pushed
him to start a festival in the metropolis divided by the Bosphorus in 2008,
a city in which he also worked as a filmmaker.
Interestingly, many of these films came from different parts of the
world, adding to the cultural and linguistic diversity for which film festivals
appeared to serve as a suitable breeding ground. Coming from a region
where linguistic policies were a major cultural and political concern, I was
curious about subtitling practices on the international circuit. I remember
the conversations about technical issues with subtitle projectionists in
Punto de Vista, as well as reflecting on the trilingual subtitling practices in
Zinebi (in English, Spanish and Basque) and wondering what happens
with Basque subtitles once the festival is over, given the limitations of
minoritized languages to be used for further exhibition.
Archival practices at these events also caught my attention. Quite unfor-
gettably, in my aim to watch films from the first editions of the Thessaloniki
viii PREFACE: VOL. 1—BY AIDA VALLEJO AND EZRA WINTON
Documentary Film Festival, I had to keep my balance on the back of a
motorbike with three boxes of VHS films covering a retrospective on
Yugoslavia programmed by the festival during the war in the 1990s. I had
found the films by digging in a warehouse in the industrial area on the
outskirts of the city thanks to the kind assistance of Thessaloniki Museum
of Cinema staff member Giorgos, who piloted the motorbike. The visit to
OSA Archivum in late winter in Budapest turned out to be quite different,
where I encountered the newest technology for film storage at an institu-
tion that benefits from the strong financial support of the Open Society
Foundation.1 Precisely at the moment I arrived (in 2009), they were sign-
ing the contract to include the films of Péter Forgács in their collection.
Throughout this period, conversations with festival directors, program-
mers, filmmakers, archivists and industry professionals provided me with
rich insights into the backstage of festival practices, but at the same time
these experiences brought about an ever-increasing number of new ques-
tions: What was the origin of these festivals? How had they developed
historically? What was their relation to politics? What were their program-
ming strategies? And what were their archival practices? How were film-
makers using them not only to exhibit films but also to get funding and
distribute them? What was their role in the preservation of linguistic diver-
sity? These two volumes provide answers to these questions, inviting the
reader to reflect upon the origins, aims and functioning patterns of the
documentary festival ecosystem.
a curator researching film festiVals as sites
of culture and Politics (ezra Winton)
Two decades ago I had an epiphany at a small film event, the World
Community Film Festival, in my hometown of Courtenay on Vancouver
Island (British Columbia, Canada), that would irrevocably change the
course of my life. I had read a review of a film that was playing at the fes-
tival, and with a friend headed to the Sid Williams Theatre to whet my
curiosity. At the time, I had little interest in documentary and knew noth-
ing about East Timor, nor media ownership concentration and the trou-
bling collusion between corporate power and media institutions, so it is
fair to say that Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media
(Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, 1992) blew my mind. After the epic
documentary’s credits rolled, I recall leaping to my feet, grabbing my
PREFACE: VOL. 1—BY AIDA VALLEJO AND EZRA WINTON ix
friend by the arm and yelling: “LET’S GO!” As I ran up the aisle past the
mostly middle-aged and elderly audience members, I felt the unique and
rare force of a life-changing, world-view-defining moment take over my
entire being. I burst out into the sleepy streets of my town, and rubbing
my eyes as they adjusted to the late afternoon light, shrieked to my friend
with a kind of a strange zeal that doubly infected and gave him cause for
apprehension: “WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING—NOW!” And off we
went, naively starting an East Timor Alert Network chapter in Courtenay
and telling everyone and anyone we could about the insidious ways main-
stream media was manufacturing our very own consent—without us even
knowing it!
It is important to note that this film was a documentary and that the
space where I encountered the said documentary was formed by a film
festival. Documentary, as fiction film’s naughty and regularly punished
cousin, rarely finds space on commercial cinema screens anywhere, let
alone in Canada’s Hollywood-owned and dominated market.2
Manufacturing Consent certainly wasn’t enjoying a celebrated run at
Courtenay’s local Megaplex alongside Reservoir Dogs, Basic Instinct and
The Crying Game. No, this profound paradigm-shifting moment in my life
occurred because two traditionally marginalized and alternative media
forms and platforms converged in my town to exhibit a film that chal-
lenged the status quo to which I had blithely and ignorantly acquiesced to
until that point. For me, that moment represents the transformative and
explosive potential of the union of socially engaged documentary cinema
and the public-facing film festival. Realizing this meant I would end up
studying, researching and creating projects that interrogate and celebrate
this combustible combination of cultural/political expression with
social space.
With that in mind, in 2003 I co-founded (with Svetla Turnin) what is
now the documentary world’s largest community and campus-based exhi-
bition network, Cinema Politica, a vast circuit in its own right, which runs
parallel to the ever-expanding film festival circuit. As an alternative exhibi-
tion network focused on showcasing political and independent point-of-
view (POV) documentaries, Cinema Politica often collaborates and
interfaces with many documentary festivals. As such, I have had the privi-
lege to attend and work with festivals like Rencontres Internationales du
Documentaire de Montréal (RIDM) and Festival du nouveau cinéma
(FNC) in Montreal, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary